Category: music

“The standing ovation shook the Metropolitan Opera on Saturday afternoon, with confetti made from ripped-up programs cascading down from the theater’s highest balcony as a bouquet of pink roses was tossed to the stage. Renée Fleming, the star soprano, had just bid farewell to one of her signature roles — the Marschallin in Richard Strauss’s ‘Der Rosenkavalier.'”

This may be as a good a time as any to offer Richard Goldstein’s confession. It isn’t anything he has tried to hide, and, in fact, he mentioned it briefly in his 2015 memoir, “Another Little Piece of My Heart.” But the revelation may be startling to Beatles fans, who have devoted their lives to interpreting every lyric, recording flourish and photograph presented by their band. The stereo Goldstein used for his review was broken. Repeat. The guy who slammed “Sgt. Pepper” in the New York Times had a busted speaker.

“In order to make music, I need three healthy relationships: with the materials of my art, with the world around me, and with the people with whom I share it. These are the building blocks of what I think of as an externally facing artistic practice. The goal of an externally facing practice is to become as complete a human being as possible, in whose life music plays a central and defining role. On the other hand, the goal of an internally facing practice — the default stance of much academic training, especially in this country — is to be the most skilled musician possible. A rich and rewarding extra-musical life is secondary. The external view is built on education; the internal one on training.”

New-music nerds of a certain age will remember Crumb’s haunting García Lorca song cycle Ancient Voices of Children or his anti-Vietnam War piece for “electric string quartet,” Black Angels. They may have been weird, but they were cool. Now the grand old man of the American avant-garde at age 87, Crumb is still composing away – most recently, Metamorphoses Book I, a cycle of piano works based on his favorite paintings. Avant-garde diva Margaret Leng Tan gave the premiere in D.C. on May 7, and David Patrick Stearns was there.

The Belgian composer-conductor, music director of the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, decided to write his own, all-new take on the concept of the Mussorgsky-Ravel favorite. (Unlike George Crumb, Brossé didn’t come up with a new title.) So he took a special tour of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and ultimately chose seven paintings from the collection – from Thomas Eakins’s The Gross Clinic to Man Ray’s Fair Weather – as his inspirations. Peter Dobrin met with Brossé to talk about the artworks and how Brossé found the music in them.

“At some point, the core product DG was offering wasn’t enough to cover larger overhead and administration costs, salaries and fees, advances and marketing budgets. The label reacted to this development by distancing itself further from its core classical business and looking for new customers. And so the things that made the Yellow Label special fell increasingly away. Loyal fans began to look elsewhere for their quality records. Browse through forums for classical music obsessives today, and you’ll find few more common targets for invective than Deutsche Grammophon.”

Members of the Brazilian Symphony Orchestra, along with the orchestra, chorus, and ballet company of the Teatro Municipal performed on the street in front of the opera house to draw public attention to the fact that they haven’t been paid since February – and to ask for donations of non-perishable food for the worst-off among them. The performers are yet more victims of the financial emergency in effect in Rio de Janeiro state since before last summer’s Olympic Games.

For 2015, David Robertson’s other orchestra recorded a budget shortfall of A$896,811; this past year, the group bounced back with a surplus of A$785,984.